SEPTEMBER 11: THE NEVER-ENDING WAR

Twenty-three years later, amid the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, who still remembers Osama Bin Laden and his unprecedented attack on the United States? Yet, this son of a wealthy Saudi family, obsessed with the Palestinian cause and especially with the desire to expel the "impious" America from the Muslim world, truly changed the world, making mass Islamic terrorism a permanent feature of global geopolitics. But not in the way he had imagined.

In May 2011, after ten years of manhunt, Bin Laden was finally found and killed by an American commando in his hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Some 96,000 documents, including a 220-page journal handwritten by Bin Laden, were discovered on-site. According to American researcher Nelly Lahoud, who spent three years analyzing them, Bin Laden completely misunderstood the consequences of his operation.

The Al-Qaeda leader had expected that a shocked American public would demand the immediate withdrawal of the United States from the Arab world, but the opposite happened. America instead rallied around its flag and its president, who launched the military operation we all know against the Taliban's Afghanistan, forcing Bin Laden and his associates to flee to Pakistan and even Iran, where the Shia mullah regime treated them with great brutality in an underground prison.

Ironically, Al-Qaeda, decapitated in Kabul, was later miraculously saved in Iraq... by the Americans, whose disastrous occupation radicalized the Sunni minority they had just ousted from power in favor of the Shiites. But this reprieve didn’t last long: Al-Qaeda’s new operational leader, appointed by Bin Laden himself, the Jordanian Musab Al-Zarqawi, could not establish the organization in the face of competition from other Sunni terrorist groups in Iraq, such as Ansar al-Sunna and especially the Islamic State, which emerged in 2010. Al-Qaeda survived, albeit precariously, thanks to its self-proclaimed branches in Yemen, Somalia, and the Maghreb... Al-Zarqawi himself was killed by the Americans in 2006.

In 2011, after eliminating Bin Laden, Obama believed he had defeated Islamic terrorism. He failed to foresee that, with the simultaneous rise of Al-Baghdadi, a new era was beginning, one dominated by the Islamic State with the foundation of a short-lived but bloody caliphate between Syria and Iraq in 2014, and its eventual destruction in 2019 by a coalition of no fewer than 87 countries led by the United States...

But this was not the end. The resurgence of terror in Afghanistan began in 2015 under the banner of ISIS-Khorasan, which brought together fighters from the region: Afghans, Pakistanis, Tajiks, Uzbeks, all led by a new emir, Shahab Al-Muhajir. The chaotic retreat from Kabul, hastily decided by Biden in August 2021 — twenty years after 9/11! — gave ISIS-K an opportunity to carry out a deadly attack at Kabul airport, killing 13 U.S. Marines. With America gone, the irony is that today, the Taliban regime, now back in power, is in charge of the fight against terrorism! Washington even supports the regime’s survival with monthly cash deliveries...

As a result, ISIS-K attacks within Afghanistan are decreasing, while attacks abroad are multiplying: in Iran, in Kerman, in early January, in Istanbul against a church a few weeks later, in Moscow in March... not to mention numerous thwarted attacks in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, and France, as the Olympics approach...

Bin Laden is dead, his successor Al-Zawahiri too, but his legacy remains very much alive. And it will be for a long time, as the fractured international community no longer offers much coordinated resistance.

Pierre Lellouche

Op-Ed, VA – September 5, 2024